Esperanza put away her knitting in a small basket. One, two, three, four, five stitches left to finish the row, which would keep her up that night. She reached for her knitting again. One, two, three, four, five years left to pay off the mortgage. Until then she would sell the things she knitted. It was an honorable way to earn a living, not like those wicked women, the women of the night. Without realizing it, she was speaking out loud. Florián, so tired he was almost sleepwalking, went silently in the direction of his sister’s bed, with the hope of finding a place to rest.

“My child, it’s bedtime.” Esperanza turned and found herself alone with the kerosene lamp. The only sound was the song of the light, telling her gently to hush now.

The Olive Green Dress

The display windows stepped forward to greet her. The only reason she had left the house that morning was to go shopping. Miss Hilton blushed easily, her skin translucent as wax paper, like those packages whose wrappings reveal all that’s inside. But beneath those transparencies were the thinnest layers of mystery, behind the branching veins growing like a little tree over the surface. She was ageless, and just when one noticed the deepest wrinkles on her face, or her long white braids, it was possible to catch an unexpected glimpse of her youth in some childlike gesture. Other times she seemed to have the smooth skin of a young girl and light blond hair, precisely at a moment when she looked as if old age had caught up with her.

She had traveled all over the world on a cargo ship, among sailors and black smoke. She knew America and almost all of Asia. She always dreamed of returning to Ceylon. There she had met an Indian man who lived in a garden swarming with snakes. Miss Hilton would bathe in a long, ample bathing suit like a balloon in the moonlight, in a lukewarm sea where one could look for the water but never find it, because it was always the same temperature as the air. She had bought a wide straw hat with a painted peacock on top, its tail feathers spilling in waves over her pensive face. She had been given precious stones and bracelets, shawls, embalmed snakes, and moth-eaten birds that she kept in a trunk in the boardinghouse. Her whole life was locked up in that trunk; her whole life was consecrated to gathering modest curiosities on all her trips, so that afterward, in a supreme gesture of intimacy that suddenly brought her close to other beings, she could open the trunk and, one by one, display her memories. Then she would once again bathe in the warm waters of Ceylon, once again travel through China, where a Chinese man threatened to kill her if she didn’t marry him. She returned to Spain where she’d faint at the bullfights, under the trembling peacock feathers of her hat that predicted, like a thermometer, the fainting spell. She returned to Italy where, in Venice, she had been a lady-in-waiting to an Argentine heiress. She had slept in a room under a painted ceiling where a shepherdess dressed in pink rested on a haystack with a sickle in her hand. She had visited all the museums. More than the canals she liked Venice’s narrow streets, like the rows of a cemetery, where her legs could run and not fall asleep as they did in the gondolas.